depression goes global

"The clinical presentation of depression and anxiety is a function not only of patients' ethnocultural backgrounds, but of the structure of the healthcare system they find themselves in and the diagnostic categories and concepts they encounter in mass media and in dialogue with family, friends and clinicians," Kirmayer wrote in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. In a globalising world, all of these factors are in "constant transaction and transformation across boundaries of race, culture, class, and nation". In other words, cultural beliefs about depression and the self are malleable and responsive to messages exported from one culture to another.

The challenge GSK faced in the Japanese market was formidable. The nation did have a clinical diagnosis of depression - utsubyo - but it was nothing like the US version: it described an illness as devastating and as stigmatising as schizophrenia. Worse, at least for the sales prospects of antidepressants in Japan, it was rare. Most other states of melancholy were not considered illnesses in Japan. Indeed, the experience of prolonged, deep sadness was often considered to be a jibyo, a personal hardship that builds character. To make paroxetine a hit, it would not be enough to corner the small market for people diagnosed with utsubyo. As Kirmayer realised, GSK intended to influence the Japanese understanding of sadness and depression at the deepest level.

Which is exactly what GSK appears to have accomplished. Promoting depression as a kokoro no kaze - "a cold of the soul" - GSK managed to popularise the diagnosis. In the first year on the market, sales of paroxetine in Japan brought in $100 million. By 2005, they were approaching $350 million and rising quickly. 

Giving depression stiff competition is the PTSD diagnosis. It has only been "official" since 1980, when it entered the American Psychiatric Association'sDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but it has had a meteoric rise. Western counsellors now use it worldwide after natural disasters, wars and genocides. According to Allan Young, a medical anthropologist at McGill, the spread of PTSD as a diagnosis worldwide may be the "greatest success story of globalisation".

Giathra Fernando, a psychologist at California State University, Los Angeles, also found culturally distinct psychological reactions to trauma in post-tsunami Sri Lanka. By and large, Sri Lankans didn't report pathological reactions in line with the internal states making up most of the west's PTSD checklist (hyperarousal, emotional numbing and the like). Rather, they tended to see the negative consequences of tragic events in terms of damage to social relationships. Fernando's research showed the people who continued to suffer were those who had become isolated from their social network or who were not fulfilling their role in kinship groups. Thus Sri Lankans conceived the tsunami damage as occurring not inside their minds but outside, in the social environment.

Many researchers who found culturally distinct expressions of trauma worry whether counsellors can be effective if they don't know the local idioms of distress. Arthur Kleinman, a medical anthropologist at Harvard University, says that although most disasters do not occur in the west, "we come in and pathologise their reactions. We say 'you don't know how to live with this situation'. We take their cultural narratives and impose ours. It's a terrible example of dehumanising people.

From NewScientist

maria mena

where is johnny going?

Ever read those happy-go-lucky forward emails or walked into the self-help section of any bookstore? Then you must be familiar with the reign of the motivation boosters singing Go Johnny Go Go at the top of its lungs. It goes something like this: 

"Quitting is the fastest way to screw up your life. And yet, so many people are doing it. And they do it for a reason: because it’s easy. It’s far more easy to abandon your goals then to stick with them. It’s easier to find excuses than to do work. It’s easier to blame it on the “life got in the way” than to actually make your dreams alive. 


I’ve been there too. I was one of those lazy quitters and I must tell you: I didn’t feel well at all. On the surface, it’s easiest to quit, that’s true. It’s easy to be lazy and wait for things to happen instead of pushing the world to make them happen for you. But deep down, quitting is more like a disease. A chronic type of pain which is slowly eating you up.


This is how I started to fight quitting. By realizing it’s a disease, something that will literally make me ill. Have you noticed how lazy people have headaches? That’s not by hazard, I can tell you. Being a quitter will work against your normal physiology, it will stop some natural processes, creating whirls of free, unused energy, which will most likely transform into body imbalances. Which we also call illnesses."


It's part of a nice article afterall. All motivational pat-on-the-backs; be it films, books, articles, males or females; true or fake; serve an inherintly good purpose. They want to make you who you want to be. Before you start listening to "The Eye of the Tiger", I have a couple of questions.

1. Why do you want to become who you want to be? 
2. Do you have a clear sense of who you are now, so that you can come up with the right action plan to take you from A(who you are) to B(whom you'll become)?
3. Will motivation really work regardless of your choice?

Looking around, I see too many failed attempts around me, too many heads down and too much misery. It's a fact: sometimes motivation doesn't work. The attempts "to become" or to "quit quitting" fail... They fail not because "life sucks" or because of the reasons why we have a word in every language for "impossible". They fail because some people make an enormous effort to go the wrong way: the way that contradicts with who they really are and what makes their heart beat.  Take any full-minded-but-half-hearted story and it will be more or less the same. People should stop taking the road to supposedly-fulfilling-destinations. It's the only way you'll ever find your own story. We keep forcing ourselves into being who we are not, forcing ourselves into sort-of-wanting what we really don't want with good but wrong intentions. When our choice is right we won't have to force ourselves at all. We won't have to bear with the price. We won't have to calculate the adequate amount of fairness involved. We won't be fooled with sticks and carrots. We will achieve the flow stage, synchronize our minds, body and hearts. When the choice is right, we won't even remember what quitting was. 

valuation of life and immortality

a LECTURE from the "death" course of shelly kagan / Yale 

The lecture begins with exploration of the question of whether it is desirable to live forever under the right circumstances, and then turns to consideration of some alternative theories of the nature of well-being. What makes a life worth living? One popular theory is hedonism, but the thought experiment of being on an "experience machine" suggests that this view may be inadequate.

truth should never be concealed ♪

Below is my summary of an article worth noting, The logic of indirect speech by Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and James J. Lee:

Indirect speech is inefficient, vulnerable to being misunderstood, and seemingly unnecessary. Yet politeness and other forms of indirectness in speech appear to be universal. We all play this game and may be offended at those who don’t, setting the stage for the hypocrisy and taboo in social life that are ubiquitously decried, yet ubiquitously obeyed. The reason people engage in these maneuvers in the first place (as opposed to saying what they mean clearly and succinctly) is still largely unexplained.

The first reason may be the logic of plausible deniability. In a simple case like bribing a police officer, the appeal of a veiled bribe is intuitively clear: If some officers are corrupt and would accept the bribe, but others are honest and might arrest the driver for bribery, an indirect bribe can be detected by the corrupt cop while not being blatant enough for the honest cop to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. A simple game-theoretic model can delineate the circumstances in which indirect speech is an optimal solution to this problem.

Second, when relationships are ambiguous, a divergent understanding between the parties can lead to the aversive emotion we call ‘‘awkwardness.’’ There are awkward moments in a workplace or university when an underling or student makes a transition from a subordinate (dominance) to something closer to a friend (communality). Good friends (communality) are advised not to engage in a business transaction (reciprocity), like the sale of a car or a house, which can endanger the friendship. The ambiguity between dominance and sex (a kind of communal relationship) is the battleground of sexual harassment conflicts, and the ambiguity between friendship and sex gives rise to the frisson of dating.

Third, when there are implications instead of blunt words, the speaker is given ‘‘the benefit of the doubt,’’ and the relationship can remain unchanged. The deniability, then, doesn’t have to be plausible, only possible. Humans employ several, mutually incompatible, modes of cooperation and, as a result, are extremely touchy about their relationships. Imagine that Harry says, ‘‘Would you like to come up and see my etchings?’’ and Sally demurs. There is little or no uncertainty about Harry’s intent, and none about Sally’s: Sally knows that she has turned down an overture, and Harry knows that she has turned down an overture. However, Sally doesn’t necessarily know that Harry knows; she might think to herself, ‘‘Maybe Harry thinks I’m naı¨ve.’’ In addition, Harry doesn’t necessarily know that Sally knows that he knows; he might think to himself, ‘‘Maybe Sally thinks I’m obtuse.’’ Although there is individual knowledge, there is no common knowledge, and they can maintain the fiction of friendship.  


Also, people always behave as if they are playing to an audience. Overt propositions, may be transmitted perfectly along chains of gossipers (in the same way that other digital media, such as files of music or images, can be transmitted losslessly). According to this hypothesis, the deniability is plausible to the virtual audience, even if it is not particularly plausible to the hearer, and people tacitly consult the reactions of a virtual audience in retaining or switching relationship types.

The paradigm illustration of common knowledge is the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. When the boy called out, ‘‘The emperor is naked!’’ he was not telling the onlookers anything they didn’t already know. Yet he was conveying knowledge nonetheless: Now everyone knew that everyone else knew, and that everyone else knew that they knew, and so on, and that common knowledge licensed the people to challenge the dominance relationship commanded by the emperor. The moral for the present theory is that language is an efficient way of generating common knowledge. Indirect speech provides shared individual knowledge, whereas direct speech provides common knowledge, and relationships are maintained or nullified by common knowledge of the relationship type.

Istanbul Connection

It's way past midnight, there is a fresh-warm weather outside, elegant stars on the parliment night and I'm kind of drunk... This has been a night of Rocky-mode-on sports, lively Greek taverns, quality rock bands, and juicy food to make the ending right. A classic content Istanbul twilight makes you proud to be alive. I'm not a party-animal who only feels right only within the chatter and the crowd, but these get-togethers definetly meet a need somewhere in the famous pyramid of Maslow.

me & my best friends, Istanbul, 2009 

Amen Break Drum Loop

"This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the "Amen Break," a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum & bass and jungle music - a six second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Nate Harrison's 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip."

photos of home